She was quiet for a while and then said, “I think we’re all figuring out who we are without her.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

She replied immediately. “For what?”

Oh god, uh … which thing to say first?

“That we couldn’t protect her … and also that I slept with her.”

“You hooked up with April?”

My brain was yelling, FUCKING IDIOT! But I replied quietly, “Oh, I thought you knew.”

She laughed. “Jesus. Is that why you’ve been so weird around me? I thought you just didn’t like me.”

I didn’t know what to say.

She continued, “Miranda, if I wasn’t friends with anyone April hooked up with in college, I wouldn’t have had many options. The fact that April hooked up with you in no way makes me think less of you. We weren’t together, she’s hot and charming. Do you still have feelings for her?”

“No!” I rushed to tell her. “I mean, I miss her. I don’t know, Maya. I’m just so confused.” My mind was working more slowly than my mouth. “You understand yourself, I don’t even know if I’m gay. Or a lesbian. Or bi? Am I bi? I’m twenty-five years old, how do I not know this about myself!”

When she spoke, which wasn’t immediately, her voice had become so gentle that it almost felt like a different person. “If I were with you, I would hug you so hard right now. I’m sorry. We’re all going at our own speed.”

I was crying now, and through my tears I asked, “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Miranda Beckwith, you take that back. I’m being nice to you because I like you and you’re a good person and we’re friends and we’re both grieving April.” Now it sounded like she was crying too.

“How did we get here?” I asked. “I was just trying to tell you about Altus.”

“Right, well, that is also important. Listen, Peter was always appealing to a lot of people. The thing that he tapped into didn’t go away, it just lost its name. People are still killing each other over this. He’s a bad guy, but he built up his connections and he’s made it into value for himself. But I don’t see what you can do about it.”

“I’m going to go if I can. I have to. But maybe I won’t be able to. I might not get the job.”

“You’ll get the job.” Everyone seemed convinced of this except me. “But look. You’re not April. Don’t take stupid risks like April.”

That made me feel like she cared about me, which made me feel really good. And the fact that it made me feel good made me feel silly for caring so much.

“I am not April. I will not take stupid risks like April.” I was getting better at lying.

@UserUncertain

I cannot tell you anything about Fish except that, at peak, I spent 60 hours a week working on solving it and, even so, I am frustrated I didn’t work harder. This will change the world.

369 replies 4.8K retweets 14.4K likes

MAYA

Helping Miranda was the most normal and wonderful and real thing I had done in months. There is nothing like being needed by someone. Relationship drama? Friends sleeping with exes? That was stuff I had experience with. It felt important but also normal. I think we’re all ultimately searching for normal but important.

Miranda also helped distract me from the new reality I was in. This reality was one where a game called Fish somehow knew where I was and had sent vaguely threatening men to acquire rocks I had bought at a place called Cowtown.

Let’s go back to that day. I was too frightened to go back to my Airbnb, so I just drove around, thinking and worrying. And that’s when I remembered something I had done very intentionally but had completely forgotten about.

I pulled the truck off on a long stretch of road so I could see a good distance both ways, and then I took the business card out of the paper bag that held the rocks.

Kurt Butler

EarthforgeMinerals.com

(856) 294-6319

I’d told Clara to convince Kurt “Probably Has Some Red Hats” Butler that the rocks were valuable and tell him that she would buy as many as he could get his hands on. And if I was right, Kurt Butler would soon be trying to get more of his special rocks to sell. I didn’t want to be anywhere but in a vehicle I could use to drive away from strange men anyway, so I went back to Cowtown.

I waited outside of the entrance, hoping that Kurt had driven his cable repair van so I could spot him. The flea market closed at four, so I was clear until then. I used that time to research Kurt Butler, which was fairly easy even just with a phone. He had a very public Facebook. It was like he had actively turned off every possible privacy setting.

Some posts were about geology and paleontology, and then a bunch of them were about grave internal and external threats to America. So, yeah.

I didn’t really care about his politics, though. I honestly didn’t think Kurt “Very Concerned About the Future of Western Civilization” Butler was some vital part of this story. I just thought he had found some rocks, and I needed to know where they came from, and he sure wasn’t going to come out and tell me.

While I waited, I opened up my podcast app and searched for “Fish Game.” It wasn’t long before I was listening to Fishing with Joe and Tim, which was basically a news service for people who played the game.

I quickly found that it wasn’t like other RGs because you didn’t have to pay for it. It started with a WhatsApp message sent seemingly at random. It requested proof that people had completed a series of increasingly bizarre tasks. The first task was always the same: You had to take a picture of yourself holding a live fish. Then maybe you’d have to record yourself telling a friend you love them or sawing a dictionary in half.

The deeper you got, the weirder the tasks got, and the quieter the people completing them became online. Aside from it being free, it wasn’t like other reality games in two ways:

 1. You could only play Fish if you got the message, and there didn’t seem to be any pattern to who got the messages except they always came through WhatsApp.

 2. People who had completed the game were notoriously quiet about the later levels, and seemed bizarrely enthusiastic that the rewards for completing the game were worthwhile.

I was pretty infected with their unquestioned enthusiasm about the whole thing when the Cowtown parking lot finally began emptying out.

At around 4:30, I spotted Kurt Butler’s van as it pulled out of the lot. I followed. Kurt did not go home, nor did he go to someplace where he might acquire more of the rocks. I was surprised to find that he went to a service call at a hotel in Wolton. As nice hotels got nicer and cheap motels became aggressively cheaper, the Wolton Motor Inn had been stranded in the middle. New awnings and a fresh paint job couldn’t obscure the outdated facade, and it looked like an attached restaurant had been closed for renovations that were no longer happening. It was trying its best to be nice, but it just wasn’t.

Kurt’s van pulled around the back to what I assumed was a service entrance. I thought about following him, but that seemed too obvious.

But then a half hour passed and Kurt still hadn’t come back out. And then another half hour. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me.